


Far From Hiryuu Castle

by EHyde



Category: Akatsuki no Yona | Yona of the Dawn
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-23
Updated: 2015-04-23
Packaged: 2018-03-25 08:50:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3804259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EHyde/pseuds/EHyde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Far from Hiryuu Castle, it takes longer to heal. Spoilers for ch 100+, tw for self-harm</p>
            </blockquote>





	Far From Hiryuu Castle

Zeno doesn’t keep track of where his wanderings take him. He barely keeps his eyes on the path in front of him. Not like falling down a ravine and cracking his skull really slows him down, other than that now he’s in a ravine. Not like he really cares where he ends up. That happened, what, a few days ago? A month? The path he found when he made his way out of the ravine was a different one, probably, and had lead back to a different road.

This time, it’s bandits. They speak a different language, but it’s obvious what they want, and when Zeno has no food or money for them to steal, they leave him for dead. _Wait, they left me for dead?_   _Why didn’t_ … wasn’t the sun high in the sky when he was attacked? It’s evening now.  _The healing took longer._ Heart pounding, frantic, he grabs a sharp rock from the ground. Scrapes it against his skin. Watches in fascination as it just … bleeds.  _How long …?_  Ten minutes. Ten minutes, at least, before it’s fully healed, and —  _Guen, Abi, Shuten —weren’t their powers weaker, when we fought in battles across the border?_  The bandits had spoken a foreign tongue.  _Where am I, anyway? And if I go far enough, will —?_

Suddenly, the medallion feels very heavy on his chest. The rock feels very sharp in his clenched fist.  _No, Kaya, Hiryuu, I won’t —_ But if there was a place he could live a normal life, a normal life with an ending, that would be all right, wouldn’t it?

He keeps walking. Every day the cuts he makes take a little longer to knit together. The first time he notices the faint line left on his skin by a cut he made the day before, he cries.

His body feels more sore, more worn-out, for a while, and then … then it doesn’t. At first he’s worried, but the cuts still bleed, still take time to heal even when they’re not very deep (that’s not a very deep cut, right? Zeno doesn’t remember what counts as deep) and he realizes that it’s just that he’s developing calluses and muscle tone that his powers never let him build up before. He feels like a real person.

He takes jobs in the villages he comes to, works for food. He doesn’t know if he needs it any more than he did before, but he hopes he does, and besides, he’s hungry. He picks up the local language, bit by bit, until he’s traveled even further and they’re speaking something else and he starts again.

It’s not that he ever says,  _this is it, here is the place I want to spend the rest (yes, the rest!) of my life_ , but Olena, the woman who feeds him dinner in exchange for chopping and stacking firewood, has an anxious look in her eyes when she says,  _there is more work, tomorrow?_  She speaks like it’s a question. Zeno had dropped a piece of wood he was stacking, and the bruise on his foot still stings when he presses it, and yes, he could work here again tomorrow.

Olena is a young widow, and her little boy Dima is too small to take care of her, and one more day turns into a week, turns into a season.  _Is this far enough from Hiryuu Castle?_  With Olena, he doesn’t have what he had with Kaya, but that’s not what he wants, anyway. The skin on his arm is soft and smooth again — he still heals, and in the long run, nothing scars, but sometimes he catches colds and one time he broke his leg and couldn’t walk for three whole days. Zeno thinks that maybe here, far from Kouka, he’s a little closer to human. A little closer to being someone who can watch little Dima grow up without having to watch him grow old.

Years pass. It’s a good life, a good home, a good family, and Zeno watches the boy grow into a strong and capable young man. _It’s strange,_  says Olena, when her son is seventeen, _but you don’t look a day older than the day I met you._

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I'm [fallenwithstyle](http://fallenwithstyle.tumblr.com) on tumblr if you'd like to come say hi.


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